Light rail — Coming to Surrey
Under it’s new leader, Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan, the Mayor’s Council has unanimously supported the Phase 2 Plan of the 10-Year Vision. This is the next major step for Broadway subway, Surrey light rail and Pattullo bridge replacement.
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Mayors Council supports the implementation of the Phase Two Plan in early-2018 as planned, including construction of the Surrey-Newton-Guildford LRT, Millennium Line Broadway Extension, the SkyTrain Upgrade Strategy and the replacement of the Pattullo Bridge, along with increases to bus and HandyDART service and funding for walking, cycling and Major Road Network infrastructure across the region;
FURTHER BE IT RESOLVED that Mayors’ Council calls on the Province of B.C. to confirm as soon as possible its partnership in delivering the Phase Two Plan as scheduled, including a provincial contribution of a 40% share of capital costs of all projects in the Vision, working with TransLink to support and extend planned increases to HandyDART service and a commitment to work with the Mayors’ Council to close the $60-$80 million annual regional funding gap fairly and affordably to residents;
Update from the Mayor of Surrey:
Major Investments in the 2018 Investment Plan:
- Surrey-Newton-Guildford Line of Surrey LRT
- Millennium Line Broadway Extension
- More rail cars and station upgrades on the existing SkyTrain system
- Additional expansion of bus service across the region
- Additional expansion of HandyDART service
- Continued improvements to major roads, cycling, walking paths, and transit access points
Less talk more action! This is all way overdue.
Indeed. Like 40 years overdue on Broadway.
The next few steps should include lobbying the feds and BC to take the subway right up to UBC in one contract instead of waiting 40 more years, then fleshing out defined study areas on an LRT network south of the Fraser and on key arterials on the peninsula. BRT could also be implemented on the 99. The Metro portion of regional commuter rail to Chilliwack and Pemberton could also be looked at.
Perhaps a new tactic should be tried: Label transit proposals as “freeways” or “bridges” or “casinos” or “pipeline” which come with automatic approval, no questions asked, and the power to ignore municipal bylaws.
I know. That’s a cynical comment.
Mayor Corrigan is one of the most pro-transit elected officials in the history of the region. He was Chair of BC Transit back in the 90’s for those that weren’t’ around back then. However, above his pro-transit stance, he is pro-pubic value and from that perspective his actions and comments make sense. If he does question mega transit investments, it’s because he is highly fiscally prudent and that concept can conflict with subsidized concepts. So his acknowledgement that it isn’t a simple straight direction but requires zigging and zagging is the most prudent way forward with transit investments. Decision makers who think critically, are well, the best type of decision makers.
Alas, the business case for high-capacity transit to the 2nd and 3rd tier areas (as opposed to 1st tier which is the existing core system) may have peaked back in the 80’s and 90’s. From what is going on around the world it will be harder to justify with the new technologies coming out as we enter the middle of this century.
And possibly you can still expand transit but it will have to adapt a bit to stay relevant. But adapting can be costly, however it is the typical last stage of a technology that will eventually become extinct. If it can macro-adapt or morph to something different then it will continue to further evolve, however then you have what is called MAAS.
At the end of the day, it’s about moving seats and who cares what the vehicle looks like. Stay modally agnostic, my friends.
Clark, thanks for your informed view.
… pro-public value […] fiscally prudent… Decision makers who think critically are … the best decision makers. New technologies … […] Stay modally agnostic, my friends.
Would that key academics, politicos, decision makers and commenters followed that advice. How many times have we read simplistic arguments on transit?
“You could buy every UBC student a Prius for the cost of the Broadway subway.”
“You could supply five times (or 6 or 7 – whatever the number pulled out of the air is today) the amount of light rail on our arterials for the cost of a subway.”
“The emissions from concrete subway infrastructure and from the towers developed by stations is horrendous.”
“You could easily roll light rail out on Vancouver’s arterials.”
“Where are our subways to the suburbs to replace wobbly buses, and where are our 10-lane freeways?”
All of these comments occurred in the nearly complete absence of analysis of route geometry, engineering criteria, life cycle accounting, cost per rider over the life span of the asset, cost per capita over life, emissions per rider / per capita over life, ridership per capita, projected displacement of VKT on roads by rail transit, existing and projected demand in the context of a growing city, the totalitarian impact of car and oil dependency on society, the need to counter that impact by balancing it equally with funding for transit, the social and economic benefits of TOD, the depletion of finite fossil resources (and the socio-economic cost of price spikes) and replacing them with renewables (will likely be less than 1:1), the competitive advantage of frequent transit networks, demand escalators lie the Network Effect, and so forth. In these matters I take the work of transport planners like Newman and Kenworthy very seriously because they have done the math for decades in cities around the world, and have defined for us the benefits of mass transit over and over.
Being fiscally prudent doesn’t translate into being cheap. Doing so will inevitably result in stupid decisions, like trying to replace perfectly reasonable bus service on average arterials with trains at the same frequency in mixed traffic, under-sizing rail transit to save money only to have demand overwhelm the system in time, especially in dense corridors with huge latent urban and regional demand from very large and growing job and population centres not currently served by any rapid transit, or underbuilding them though misguided ideological policies surrounding P3s. What is more beneficial to society, spending $3B on a decent subway with huge ridership gains and 65 years of profitable emissions-free service over its 100-year life, or spending $1.5B on light rail with marginal if any gains and the need to reconsider that mode after a decade of suffering service?
It never ceases to confound me that senior governments think nothing of putting tens of billions into roads and highways every generation without blinking an eye, but get caught up in the narrative that transit is of lesser importance financially but incongruently must receive a lot more scrutiny from one perspective only: the myopic bottom line. Witness the 2015 plebiscite fiasco.
In my view Corrigan saw one of his most outspoken demands come true: senior governments finally ponied up 80-90% of the transit funding. Perhaps that explains his vote more than anything. And in that case, bravo!
With respect to tech, there are serious doubts that AV will result in that much change from several perspectives: Public financing of road infrastructure for private transport on a continuing basis; the very strong preference for private vehicle ownership over car share or for-hire amongst non-transit users; the social acceptance of sharing rides with others in the rush hours – which is the only way to increase the occupancy of vehicles over today’s egregiously lower rate of the car-commuting public in a growing city; the management efficacy of hired / shared cars (cleanliness, availability, cost, route planning with multiple riders, etc.); and the need to compete with the superiority of fast, frequent and affordable public transit.
I think the problem with these discussions and the resulting simplistic arguments is that we tend to speak our minds but when it comes to actually doing the work not many actually do the work (or maybe can). So we then look for some source to back up our argument. But then there are other sources to counter the argument, and so on.
Regarding the use of quantified and normalized metrics and indicators, I wholeheartedly agree. But I find the singular statistics, no matter how official they look in an infographic, can also hide errors of accuracy in the form of data quality and quantity, not to mention methodological limitations.
You quote Kenworthy’s work. I provided him with data for Vancouver in the mid 90’s. I included many disclaimers and my worry is they were ignored because most researchers are data-starved (i’m one of them). What matters is that you get results and subsequent publications pumped out and it is a night and day difference if you can source your data from government databanks. Having calculated many of the metrics you quoted over the years, I can tell you it’s very difficult to be holistic and all-encompassing. That is obviously the goal of good analysis to support good public policy and you could say my career aspiration. But it is very exhaustive and simply mentioning these indicators is not enough. One needs to understand these indicators are merely the tip of the iceberg in the huge amount of data, methodology, costs, expertise, and effort required just to produce one number like “transit mode share.”
So I’m in complete agreement with you, Alex, but it is very difficult to do the things you mention. Not that I/we are not trying but it’s no cakewalk, which may seem like it is to many the way we discuss these deeply-complex issues in short bursts of commentary on a public blog.
Anyways, I have grown to really appreciate current and past politicians, like Mayor Corrigan and Councillor Gordon Price, who have personally asked me for data or really wanted to know the details behind the high-level statistics…because they care. So I am optimistic when such public figures are in positions of increasing influence, and their decisions are based on evidence and not merely anecdotes.
However, I still think there’s something about he curing of concrete that makes anything built out of that material–regardless of how many LEEDS points you give–still a potential for the project to be in the red for many years before it is “profitable” in terms of GHG abatement. I’m sure there’s research done on it somewhere, but I don’t have time to look it up….
An excellent commentary, Clark. Thank you.
WRT the second and third tier transit projects / phases, I would hope the calculation would include a projection of future development. With the Broadway subway, for example, that would include not just the announced projects like Jericho, but also a look at infill in West Kits and Point Grey, the UBC golf course site (larger than Jericho and owned by the Musqueam, and not likely to stay undeveloped forever), and of course UBC itself. These three elements alone could push the timeline a little closer given today’s increasing rate of urban development and development partnerships with First Nations
I know that one larger design, tender and construction contract offers significant savings over two that are years (if not decades) apart. This is why I believe there may be some real value to consider getting ahead of the demand curve with one subway contract all the way to campus rather than shorting it at Arbutus and picking it up years / decades later in another contract. Naturally, this will catalyze the planning process in Kits, Point Grey and the UEL. This is not a sop to developers; it is in the interest of fostering sustainable urbanism based on high-capacity transit.
I worked on one rather minor but significant project using a lot of concrete where the engineer specified lower emission concrete under the trade name Ecosmart. It was more expensive, but didn’t blow the budget. About 35% of the Portland cement was displaced with waste products like fly ash, and some of the sand aggregate was displaced by the glass-like by-product from the Trail smelter. He calculated that the concrete was over 60% harder after curing than average. The emissions were also significantly reduced overall, but I’d have to unbury the 2004 report to get that figure. Nonetheless, it won an award from a materials engineering organization for in part reducing the GHG content.
A concrete subway tunnel lining will, of course, have lots of emissions attached to its construction profile. However, for a prof to have used this factoid in a published comment in isolation from a century of emissions-free service is not just a mistake, but IMO was unprofessional. Another engineering report I read compared the universal emissions over a long period of time from all sources from high density downtown Toronto where concrete construction is common, to the universal emissions of low density suburbia over the same period and found the latter slaughtered downtown with higher emissions from long term operations that included primarily transport by car and building heating. The measurements were reduced to the per capita common denominator.
Sometimes larger capital costs and emissions are necessary up-front to produce orders of magnitude more savings and reductions over the life of a project.
I’m not an expert in concrete technology, but there are new advances in this field that are “greening” the industry and some even absorb emissions produced from vehicles. Prof. Nemkumar Banthia is a world expert (right here at UBC!) and he recently developed “self-healing” concrete, reducing the cost and energy required to re-surface.
However, the use of the latest tech is not common practice given the range of barriers from awareness, cost, production/availability, and practice. And if we continue to “hide” the environmental cost of “sustainable infrastructure” built by standard concrete then we will never allow these newer and more sustainable technologies to mature or become significant enough. So a full life cycle cost analysis and accounting helps to reveal inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of current practices and therefore helps to make room for innovations when these externalities are added to the business case. That is the idea of things like carbon offsets and although they have their issues, they at least expose the true cost of things.
A related issue on the transit file is the absence of the feds from involvement in transit and housing funding for many years, until just last year. If the feds really wanted to generate savings for the people, then they could through Public Works procurement policy and the Infrastructure Bank have a tremendous sway over vendor unit prices through quantity discounts. They traditionally prefer to hand out the money and have the provinces build stuff, but in a case like this they may have to consider joint federal-provincial agencies to finance and build projects.
Under a National Transit (or housing) Plan the agencies could procure four or five tunnel boring machines at a quantity discount, then spread their costs over eight or 10 projects nation-wide, including repairs between tunneling jobs. In that scenario, it would be possible to have two machines working on one project at a time to minimize local construction schedules and disruption. The same could apply to bus fleet contracts in the thousands of units instead of tens or hundreds, not to mention all kinds of rail rolling stock and track contracts. Negotiating Canadian content, local benefits and higher quality specs would also have a lot more power when national contracts are offered.